Dunno about you, but I’m ready for a clusterfuck of an election season.
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I worry we’d get another Obama.
Relatively light voting record, vague promises of change, must be cool because they’re not a white guy though right? Then they go full neoliberal - surveilance, drone killing, not doing anything about wall street - the works
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I don’t believe Warren will be as hawkish, though time will tell. Either way, I’d take another Obama over the alternative. I do think that she’s going to have problems if she thinks she’s going to win by essentially allowing herself to be trolled by Trump and feeling the need to respond to every single thing out of his mouth. That was one of the Dem’s big failures last time. Trump is a Gish-gallop in human form, it’s very easy to fall into the trap of letting him govern the conversation and eat up airtime.
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Damn, I thought I was the only one here who used the term “Gish gallop.” Could not be more accurate, though. Trying to respond to his insanity is a complete waste of time, especially since he forgets it probably before he hits “send.”
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For those fortunate enough not to have been drawn into evolution debates.
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Odds are she’ll never make out of the primaries. trump will make mince meat out of her in the meantime. We need somebody who can kick trump in the nuts every time he opens his lie hole. I don’t think she’s the one to accomplish that.
This exactly. She’s done little in her time as Senator unless you count writing letters.
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it’s like the 2010 midterms never happened
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I would too, but I think we’ve seen how that will play out in France with Macron - mass protests when people catch on that they’ve been sold a lemon. And I don’t trust the American police to be as restrained.
Senate Banking Committee.
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don’t get me wrong, I’m cautiously optomistic and I’d be proud to vote for the firt woman they same way I was proud to vote for the first black president.
But at the end of the day with Obama we got a pretty bad president who was blessed to be sandwiched between two of the worst. He campaigned specifically on transparency then went after leakers harder than any before (including Bush). Was anti-Iraq war, but drone-happy. Slow on gay marriage. Refused to do basic things like deschedule marijuana on his way out that could have made positive change in spite of a deadlocked congress.
To be honest, I was young. I was… full of hope. It was the first presidential election I could vote it. I was proud, and hopeful. And it was crushing to see that his legacy is “hey at least I’m not Bush!”.
To have that followed by Bernie being kneecapped in the primaries… I held my nose and voted for Hillary.
But for people of a certain age, the game feels rigged and there’s very mixed emotions about Obama.
I often feel stuck in a microgeneration - a teenage era with cell phones and internet, but not social media and smartphones. Or maybe the younger ones feel this way too…
But it was crushing to go from that feeling of hope and progress to… this.
Don’t worry - I’m not an asshole “accelerationist”, but I’m deeply worried that the Democrats did not take the right lessons from 2016, and that even if they win we’re going to face some serious unrest in 5-10 years, when a Democrat can’t free-ride off the economy and actually have to make some substantive effort.
what specifically did you like that she did on that committee?
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all these candidates are going to be great candidates
no-one should be told they shouldn’t run
but I just worry about all the money they drain out of supporters, when there are 20+ big names, that is a mega-ton of money being burnt up
I’m kinda curious to see a study of where all that money goes, I suspect it’s not back into cities but rather big media-conglomerates for advertising which means just a few already rather wealthy individuals “cash out” on candidates
I think that Warren has some solid consumer protection cred. Macron was/is better than the alternative, as well. Let’s not forget who Marin Le Pen was/is. I do think Warren’s been institutionalized, but as a friend on Facebook pointed out, I’d rather be fighting moderates. Hell, I’ll take Biden at this point. There are two ways of thinking about it: Either you think of it as taking the lesser of two evils and moving on with life, or you take an activist tack and think of it as choosing the form of the destructor. You’re in a fight no matter who wins, so if you pick your opponent, who do you pick?
Warren is fundamentally moveable on the issues, and I’ll take protests in the streets, over the hundred fires we’re all trying to put out/deal with right now. It’s not even about accelerationism versus alleviationism, because those don’t even answer the fundamental question of what you’re trying to alleviate or accelerate towards. Either you fight strategically towards specific goals, or it’s just a tribal thing. You pick your team and go home, and spectate and see who wins. Voting is one heuristic. It doesn’t win wars, it just shapes the battlefield.
It’s not that voting is useless, it’s that it doesn’t do everything we wish it did. It’s one tool. Use the tool, put the tool in the bag, and move on to the others, whether that’s yellow vests, or wildcat strikes, or what have you. Most people, in all truth and honesty, can just vote before moving on with their lives. That’s fine. Let them create as favorable a battlefield for the rest of us. But I fundamentally don’t understand the whinging and whining and hand-wringing we’re increasingly expected to do about voting. It’s literally just one easy thing, and easy things never get you everything you want.
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yes I think that it’s very good la pen lost.
honestly my thoughts are that I think if there’s going to be mass protests as automation and gentrification make it literally impossible to live, I’d rather a democrat be in charge of the national guard.
Or maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll allow us to vote for an actual progressive 
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Who’ll be very quickly hamstrung by the thousand emergencies of being a president and the typical political bartering and bickering of a system designed for gridlock. Progressive candidates and eventual (hopefully) leaders also have a very real struggle: They often don’t have access to real policy ideas. A typical congresscritter or president can always rely on the Heritage Foundation or the Brookings institute to offer up expertise and wisdom. A progressive or truly radical candidate often lacks concrete policy ideas that go beyond broad strokes. This is especially the case in international affairs and military affairs. Progressives often de-prioritize creating comprehensive alternatives to the current status quo, leaving progressive politicians in the lurch when the time comes for them to actually lead. We do need to build that ideological infrastructure or progressives will either falter in office, or become institutionalized.
There’s always a fight. It’s always exhausting, and it never, never, never stops. There’s no final victory, because even a theoretical utopia is a police state, always vigilant against backsliding, and that very police-state-ness must itself be carefully calibrated. I think what I’m trying to put down here is that voting is so only the beginning.
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Obama was an imperfect President, as all Presidents have been. But characterizing him as a “bad” President implies that many of his predecessors were better.
Who were these Presidents that had fewer or less serious failings than Obama? The only one who even strikes me as a contender is Carter.
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Agreed, Carter was good and as someone pointed out, hamstrung by the machine.
I think Obama was worse than say, Bush the first in the way that he didn’t do as he claimed. Bush was bad, but people were getting what they requested. Obama specifically ran on things like transparency and return to international norms, then droned “terrorists” and abused leakers.
I don’t buy into the rhetoric that just because others were worse a president should get a pass on bad behavior. There were many things completely within Obama’s power that he got wrong.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still vote for him, Hillary etc since I’m not crazy, but I think we need to step back and acknowledge that these are bad people. We teach people in civics that they get to choose the president, and if you continually tell people to pick the lesser of two evils, well… you get Trump.
Look at the maps. There are many counties that voted Obama 2x that went Trump. Many of them are in Michigan and other areas that Hillary didn’t deem necessary to visit because she felt entitled to those votes. Her rhetoric is vaugely incel - she’s an involuntary civillian, the voters all vote for jerks with name like Chad or Donald, if they;'d just vote for a NICE GIRL and realize they need to settle because they’ll never snag a Stacy or a Bernie but they just keep going for REACTIONARY JERKS. She’s going her own way (into the woods) and will continue to argue that not wanting the same neoliberal policies from a woman in 2018 as man in 1996 is sexist.
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As did every President, Carter included. I expect Warren will get things wrong if she ever gets the job too. But it seems disingenuous to label Obama as “a pretty bad President” if you can’t name at least a few people who did the job better.
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Nope, it’s still valid to say the man that kills people from the sky with robots is bad, even if other people did worse things.
If every President was at least as bad as Obama then you could just say “he was as bad as other Presidents.” Saying “he was a pretty bad President” implies the existence of someone who was less so.
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He’s already going at her. She needs to grow a pair and fast.
Stand up to the bully. Kick him in the nuts.
Let’s see if she can stand her ground. This is about perception and if she can’t hold her own she’s toast. She needs to go full on Avanetti. Like, to eleven.
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